So a few weeks ago I attended a book fair in Lima, Peru. I was asked to go by the State Department; apparently I’d gotten good feedback from the folks in Uruguay a year or two ago. So when this Lima Book Fair, a co-production of the Lima government and the State Department, appeared on the horizon, I was suggested by the State Department as a guest (along with several other folks) and it seems the people in Lima were really enthused by that. Of course, since they all read translations of my work, I’m figuring it’s more of an endorsement of the translator’s skill than anything else.
Anyway, as I’ve learned with my multiple adventures getting into and out of Canada, nothing comes easily for me when it involves air travel.
In this instance, I was to fly from Long Island to Philadelphia, where I could catch a 1 PM flight down to Atlanta. It would get me in at 3:20, plenty of time to change to the 5:20 to Lima.
So I get to Philadelphia a good three hours ahead of my flight. I check the boards. My 1 PM flight is now delayed by half an hour…and then an hour…and then an hour and forty-five minutes. I’m hemorrhaging connection time and anyone who’s ever changed in Atlanta can tell you that’s not always an easy endeavor. I go to the Delta desk and inform them that I’m ready; why, as per their commercials, aren’t they? I’m informed a mechanical problem has been discovered on the equipment which is currently IN Atlanta and has yet to take off (turns out the windshield was cracked. Wonderful.) So she rebooks me onto the 2:15 PM which I’m told will get me into Atlanta at 4:30 PM. My two hour window has just been trimmed to fifty minutes. Tighter, but not impossible. I check a little further and discover that we’re going to be landing at the furthest possible gate in Terminal A, and naturally–naturally–my connection is going to be at the furthest possible gate at Terminal E (almost the furthest possible terminal).
I call my contact at the State Department and bring her up to speed. If I miss the flight out of Atlanta, then I’m stuck in Atlanta overnight because the next flight to Lima is 24 hours later. She says she’s going to do two things: First, ask Delta (since I’m connecting Delta-to-Delta) if they can hold my connecting flight. And second, she’s going to try and arrange for one of those electric golf carts to speed me along. The cart can’t get me from terminal to terminal–only the dámņëd train can do that–but at least it can get me to the train point faster than on foot.
Some minutes later she calls me back to inform me that Delta refuses to hold the flight, but that they will do their level best to make sure there’s an electric cart waiting for me.
So I board the 2:15. We pull away from the gate.
And we wait. Because of weather somewhere along the route. We don’t take off for half an hour, so that further erodes my connection time.
Once we’re en route, a flight attendant comes over to me. She has a clipboard. “Mr. David?” she says.
I’m in the middle seat being crushed between two people who are both heavier than I am. “Yes.”
She says, “I’m happy to tell you that we can absolutely guarantee you a wheelchair when we arrive.”
“Ah. Okay, well…that’s very kind of you,” I say, “but I don’t need a wheelchair. What I need is an electric cart.”
“Well we can’t promise you a cart, but I can guarantee you a wheelchair.”
OKay, clearly there’s been a misunderstanding. “I don’t need a wheelchair,” I said. “I can walk. What I need, for the purpose of speed, is an electric cart.”
“We don’t know where the carts will be at any given time. But I can definitely arrange for a wheelchair.”
I glance at the guys on either side of me, because I think I’m making myself clear, but obviously I’m not. They shrug. I turn back to her.
“Listen,” I say, “I’m ambulatory. I’m capable of locomotion. I can walk. I can run. What concerns me is that I can’t run fast enough to make my connection. Every minute counts, and if running the length of the terminal takes me fifteen minutes, and riding in the cart takes three, that could be the difference between making my flight or being stuck overnight in Atlanta. I need the cart not for comfort, but for speed. The wheelchair will not only do me no good, but it would actually hamper my ability to make my connection. Is that clear?”
“Yes, absolutely,” she says with a Stepford Wife smile. “The problem is that we can’t guarantee you a cart. However…we definitely CAN make sure you have a wheelchair.”
Okay, NOW she’s just trying to make me lose my mind. “Look,” I said, very patiently, “unless the guy pushing the wheelchair is an Olympic sprinter, and his hobby is wheelchair races, the wheelchair will be worse than useless. I need to make my flight and we’re running half an hour late…”
“Oh, we’ll be fine,” she says confidently. “The Captain will make up some of the time. We’ll land at 4:45 at the latest, so that will make up fifteen minutes.”
“Right, and when we do, they’ll tell us there’s no gate for us, so we’ll wait another fifteen minutes for a gate.”
“I’m sure that won’t happen,” she says with certainty. “And besides, because of the weather, your connecting flight will probably be delayed.”
“No,” I say with a heavy sigh, having been down this road before. “It’ll leave right on time. And it would be really nice if there could be an electric cart waiting for me to help me get to it.”
“Can’t promise it, but,” and she was so CHIPPER, that was the killer, “I’ll make sure there’s a wheelchair waiting for you.”
I stare at her. “That would be great,” I tell her.
She walks away and before I can say anything to my seatmates, they immediately say, “It’s not you. It’s her.”
So we get to the airport. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Although we have landed, they don’t have our gate ready, so it’ll just be a few more minutes…”
Fifteen minutes later I emerge at the far end of Terminal A. Five PM straight up. No cart. There’s a guy about ten years my senior, ninety pounds, waiting with a wheelchair. I run past him. For all I know he’s still there.
I sprint as fast as I can the maximum distance from where I was to the trains. A cart rolls past me shepherding half a dozen laughing teenagers. If they had one neck, I’d hack it through.
It’s ten past five as I get onto the train. It buzzes along and I’m running up the escalator. As I emerge on the top, it’s 5:15 and there is absolutely no way I’m going to be able to get to the departure gate at the other end in time. I glance around. No cart. A random attendant walks past with a wheelchair. Despairing, I glance at the departure screen for my flight. It says, BOARDING. It’s leaving bang on time. Of course. Then I notice it says “GATE CHANGE.” If it tells me it’s leaving from Terminal A I’m going to blow my brains out. I look at the new gate.
E9.
My head whips around. I’m standing in front of E9. God has decided to cut me a break. I’m right there but they’re getting ready to close the door.
“Hold it!” I shout as I sprint toward the desk. “Hold it, I’m right here!” I nearly collapse onto the desk, clutching my ticket. My biggest fear is that they’ve given away my seat.
The woman at the desk looks like a dead ringer for the flight attendant. She çøçkš her head at me like a poodle and says, “Are you on this flight?”
No, not yet, y’idjit, I’m standing here with you asking me stupid questions while that guy over there is getting ready to button it up. I settle for, “Yes. My connecting flight ran late. I had to run.”
“Oh,” she says. She takes the ticket, does whatever she’s supposed to do, hands it back to me. As I stagger to the door, the last one onto the plane, she calls after me, “If this ever happens again, you should arrange for an electric cart.”
PAD
• 
I flew back home (Puerto Rico) on vacation for two weeks in July. I flew from Syracuse (1hr delay at the terminal for mechanical problems) to Philly (35min delay for mechanical problems). When I arrive in Sna Juan (Puerto Rico) and call my father to see how far from the airport they are, I find out that the car has mechanical problems and Im on my own.
On my way back from San Juan we had a 1hr delay at the runway. When I arribe at philly (with only 10mins to get to my connectin flight), I run to the bus that takes me to right terminals, run to my terminal, only to find out that its been moved. When I finally get to the new terminal I panic when I see it closed, turns out that flight was delayed…a 6hr delay…They never told us what the mechanical problems were, but I think a saw a man with a roll of duck tape near the wing.
See, if I had that flight attendant, you’d probably hear about me in the news for “interfering with a flight crew”, because I don’t think I’d be able to keep from yelling at her (and that’s more than enough to get you hauled off a plane in cuffs these days).
Because it’s one thing to do your job badly, but it’s quite another to be a brain-dead moron in the process.
Peter,
It isn’t just you, it’s the entire system!
We did a little trip this summer to see my wife’s nephew’s wedding in Mobile. If you look at the statistics for all these flights, it says that they have phenomenal reliability and very little delays, always on time. This means that they must cook the books, perhaps by saying that anytime it is over 15 minutes late that something else happened, it wasn’t merely late…
Arrived in plenty of time for our first flight (5:30AM in Palm Springs, we were they as TSA opened for the day…) only to find the gal at gate telling everyone that our flight has been canceled, and that she will call each family up one at a time and make other arrangements. She is the only one on duty for a flight of about 60 people…
Half an hour later, she calls our names (we begin with E) and rebooks us on later flights to LA and Houston. As we leave, she is up to the M’s on rebooking folks… 😉
In LA, we find out that there is an earlier flight to Houston leaving soon, but United refuses to rebook us. It wouldn’t save us more than 45 minutes anyway. 🙁
Flight to Houston we are on is delayed two hours due to weather, the Houston airport had been flooded that morning. When we arrive in Houston, we see that the flight we were originally book on is still there, but loading… two terminals away… We run like crazy, but don’t make it. Back to the zoo and wait another two hours for our flight, which is an hour late.
So, our six hour trip actually took 14 hours. The trip back was on time, but just as stressful. I wish our experiences were unusual!
When the flight attendant told you she would have a wheelchair, you should’ve asked “Is it an electric wheelchair?”
Great story. Perky service people who don’t listen and can only keep repeating what they’ve been programmed to say are the bane of my existence.
I don´t know why, but I have found that the service of airlines in the U.S. is worst than the Mexican Airlines (we still have lunch free of charge and usually eatable food if not yummy). As for connecting flights in the U.S., I usually skip them whenever I can, since as a general rule the flights I’m arriving land late and the ones I’m connecting fly early. Also, since I arrive from a International flight, our port of entry is the first airport, so you can imagine the nightmare with the new security measures: at least it will take additional 40 minutes to pass check ins and security.
That said, gates in Mexico are arranged depending on the Airlines size, so if you are flying in the cheapest companies, it is almost sure there won’t be a gate assigned.
We just flew back from Toronto to Newark on Monday morning… we were supposed to fly back on Sunday afternoon, but that didn’t happen because… you know, airlines do what they wanna do. they never bothered to inform us that the flight had been cancelled and when we called and found we’d been booked on the next morning’s milk run and requested seats on one of the three flights they had later that evening, they tried to book us on a flight that had already left Toronto.
This strikes me as almost to the level of something that you couldn’t put in a work of fiction, because no one would believe it. It’s that whole, “The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.”
On the other hand, I’ve only flown a few times in my life and not at all in the last ten years so maybe it’s entirely believable to those that are familiar with the system.
How did you end up having an itinerary with 2 stops? Aren’t there direct flights from NYC? 2 stops seems like asking for trouble…
That’s international flights for you. Even the biggest airports aren’t going to fly to every country. Just consider the fact that Atlanta is a gigantic hub, yet they only have one flight to Lima each day.
My parents had a similar experience, though not so extreme. At the beginning of the year they came to visit me here in the Dominican Republic. They had a five hour layover, which sounded crazy when they told me about it. With all the delays, they actually ended up with a little more than an hour to change planes.
I get that on an intrinsic level, but still its JFK, possibly the biggest hub airport in the world. Your telling me that even if you cant catch a direct flight, ur next best option is to stop in philly for sum reason and then stop in atlanta as opposed to miami?
Yes, because he was flying Delta, and their hub is in Atlanta.
Just for the record, there are direct flights to Lima from NYC. I am guessing only a few airlines do that. Lan has direct flights at least.
Atlanta is actually the busiest airport in the country by number of passengers, and it’s not even close: +43 million passengers in 2010 compared to #2, O’Hare in Chicago having +32 million passengers.
JFK comes in at #6, behind O’Hare (Chicago), Los Angeles, Dallas/Forth Worth, and Denver.
Because they gave me the option of going out of a small airport in Long Island. A nice, traffic-free ten minutes away, as opposed to driving the hour (or more, depending on traffic) JFK and LaGuardia, the homes of incompetent baggage handlers and THE most obnoxious TSA people around. It meant I had to change planes a couple times, but during the layovers I found places to set up my computer and work, so it wasn’t as if I had nothing to do.
PAD
Are any of the Canada stories written up on the blog? If so I will attempt my meagre search-fu to find them.
It’s not Canada but here’s another story PAD told of airline stupidity:
http://www.peterdavid.net/2011/08/12/in-ireland-for-irecon-part-1/
http://www.peterdavid.net/2011/08/15/irecon/
Here’s a Canada story, but the problem was extreme turbulence:
http://www.peterdavid.net/2011/09/05/in-montreal-for-space-cases/
Had my own fun escaping from San Diego after Comic-Con. I’m on the last Southwest flight to SFO. It’s delayed for a couple of hours due to severe weather in Tuscon where it’s coming from. OK, I understand that; it happens.
Thing is, San Diego has an 11:30 p.m. curfew for departing flights. So we’re told that when the plane arrives, we’ve got to all board the full flight at warp speed. Most people are pretty good about this and we get boarded in time.
Then we sit there. And sit there. And it’s getting darn close to when we were told we’d have to pull back in order to take off in time.
An attendant got on the PA and told us that our projected pilot had just timed out and couldn’t fly the plane, and they were trying to find another. OK, this I mind. They’ve had several hours to realize this was a possible problem, but haven’t gotten a back up pilot. We miss the curfew.
Then, with all of us back in the terminal, they told us that the “Customer Relations Office is closed” or at least not picking up their phone. Another inexcusable bit. So we’re told we’ll be flying out on the same plane in the morning (good news, since otherwise it’ll be late in the day or Tuesday before they could get everyone out)…but we don’t know what, if any, compensation we’ll get.
By this point, to go to a hotel, get checked in, then get back in the morning, would mean getting a whopping 4 hours of sleep. Without knowing if there’ll be compensation for the hotel or not. So I figure just sack out in a chair…which has to be on the other side of security since they won’t let us stay in the “gone through security” section.
On the good side, we did get $300 vouchers. But given that Southwest usually has its act together, I was very disappointed at the number of things they had plenty of time to prepare for that they didn’t.
It seems to me that everyone’s missed the scariest detail here.
It’s not news when a mere mortal civilian gets railroaded by airline bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened here; what happened here is that Delta railroaded the U.S. Dept. of State in a way that could easily have severely hampered the execution of an international diplomatic event.
In that sort of bureaucracy-vs.-bureaucracy firefight, the rule is that the government always wins. Yet here the government did not win — and that shouldn’t have happened. The fact that it did says disturbing things about the broken-ness of the air travel system….
And stuff like this is why I never fly. If it’s in the states, I’ll drive. And I’m pretty sure I’ll be willing to swim VS fly for an overseas trip.
I wish I didn’t have to fly. And being 30k feet in the air is not a problem for me, in of itself. It’s EVERYTHING ELSE involving flying that’s the problem, particularly TSA in recent years.
Of course, I’ve also never owned a car, which makes the whole driving everywhere a bit of a problem. Not to mention being able to get the time off from work to be able to make such trips feasible.
I really do envy my European friends who can come over for a month and just drive where ever they want.
On the theme of airplanes sapping mental faculties:
Last December, I was flying from Pittsburgh to Salt Lake City through Phoenix. As we were preparing for takeoff in Pittsburgh, the flight attendant informed us that the local time in Phoenix was two hours behind Pittsburgh local time “because in Arizona we don’t observe daylight savings.”
For no particularly good reason, I muttered to myself “No, it’s because Phoenix is 2000 miles west of here.” At which point, the woman next to me replied “No, we really don’t set our clocks back in Arizona.”
“Fine,” I said, “but it’s not daylight savings time here either. The time difference is because Phoenix is in another time zone.”
“Well… in Arizona, we don’t set our clocks back.”
I never knew Arizonans were so militantly anti-daylight-savings. However, I think it also means they’re a little fuzzy on how it actually works…
Did you tell her that you need her name and ID number for legal purposes, so that your lawyer has the information?
I have no idea if it would help or not, but I’ll bet people start getting more interested in assisting you when THEIR situation becomes involved.
And worst case, if you do need to resort to legal channels, you do have the information.
The most bizarre experience I ever had in traveling was when I was leaving Texas and had to board a plane at George H. W. Bush Airport (at least I think that’s where it was. Could be wrong. I get hazy on locations, but the details of the encounter, I remember).
I’m going through security and this TSA woman blocks my way and says, “I need to see your ID.” I’m unsure why; it had already been checked by someone else. But y’know, whatever. It’s still in my hand. So I present my passport, and she doesn’t even glance at it. She says, “I need to see your driver’s license.”
Now understand that my driver’s license picture is kind of goofy. I have this big demented grin on it. Every time I would show it at airport security, they’d pull me aside for extra examination. So I took to using my passport which has the more typical mugshot look to it. It generally smooths my passage.
Not this time apparently.
So I say to her, “This is my passport.” This time I kind of wave it in front of her, waiting for her to take it.
She doesn’t even look at it. “I need to see your driver’s license.”
Okay, this is now beyond my concern over my driver’s license photo. This woman doesn’t know her job. I’m not letting this out of my teeth. I don’t care if they drag me in the back and take a rubber hose to me. “This is a passport,” I tell her again. “It’s like the Cadillac of ID.” Allowing for the possibility that security has been stepped up for some reason, I ask, “Are you saying you need two forms of ID?”
“No,” she says, digging in. “Just the one: your driver’s license.”
I glance behind me. There are people waiting, but they’re not looking at me in irritation; they’re staring at the woman with incredulity. They’re probably thinking, Good. Let this guy deal with her. I turn back to her. “A passport is a Federal ID. This is all you need.”
“I need your driver’s license.”
“No, you really don’t.”
She decides to drop her version of the A-Bomb on me. “Sir,” she says in as threatening a voice as she can, “do you want to speak to my supervisor?” From the suggested menace, one might envision her supervisor is Darth Vader.
“Bring him on,” I say with the clear conscience of the righteous.
In comes the supervisor. Big guy, shaved head. “There a problem here?” he rumbles.
“He’s refusing to show me his driver’s license,” she says in her best J’accuse tone.
Without a word I hold up my passport. He stares at it. “Is this your passport?”
“Yes. It’s what I’ve been trying to show her.”
His eyebrows knit. He takes it, looks at it. It’s valid. He turns to the woman. “This is a passport.”
This isn’t going her way. She’s confused, but it’s the stubborn confusion of the intransigent. “He’s supposed to show me his driver’s license,” she says.
The supervisor stares at me. I say nothing because my expression says it all: See? See what I’ve been dealing with? He looks back to her, then to me, then to her. He hands me back the ID and without taking his eyes off the woman, says, “Go ahead, sir. You,” and I know he’s no longer talking to me, “come with me.” Off he goes with the still-protesting TSA woman.
I hope they gave her a cavity search to see if they could locate her brain.
PAD
TSA employees (to call them officers is an insult to the human race) all think they’re kings of their own little security kingdoms. In the end, PAD, I’d consider you one of the lucky ones. Often, if the supervisor has to get involved, you’re missing your flight because TSA decided to make an example out of you for no good effing reason whatsoever, but simply because they can. They simply love having power trips.
Earlier you mentioned how bad JFK and LaGuardia are. We’re flying home out of LaGuardia next month after a cruise, and we’re dreading it. We’re flying into Baltimore and spend a day in DC, then are taking a train up NYC the morning of the cruise so we spend as little time in NYC as possible. But we couldn’t get the time off after the cruise to do the same on the way home: get the hëll out of NYC by any means other than plane, and fly home from somewhere else.
Side note: Since you already live in the area, did you ever look at the cruises Disney is doing out of NYC up to Halifax & St. John? I know you’re a big Disney fan, but IIRC you’ve never mentioned whether you’ve done one of their cruises (or any cruises with anybody else) and what you thought of it.
Man, Delta.
Did you know they have three types of standby lists in their system? One is the dark list that doesn’t get you on standby displays and doesn’t get you onto planes. The second gets you onto standby displays but also doesn’t get you onto planes. Only the third does both.
I wonder if they have a fourth?
Re: the flight attendant It’s not just “perky” flight attendents. I swear there must be some handbook for dealing with the public that tells people: “If you have an irate customer, just smile politely and keep repeating what you said the first time over nd over and over.” Ive encountered this numerous times. I try to tell the person that he/she is not answering the question I asked. Rixed smile and same answer. Lather, rinse and repeat. If I’m ever arrested for manslaughter, it’ll be because of an encounter with one of these nimrods.
Re: TSA employees. You do get good ones from time to time. I’ll always remmeber the chap I encountered one time at the San Francisco airport. He was standing near the beginning of the line, telling people what they needed to remove and place in the tray, etc., but joking with the passengers, and generally making everyone feel relaxed and comfortable with the tedious process. Sadly, he’s the exception. The best you can hope for most of the time is quick, competant and not too sullen. I’ve never encountered any one quite as dense as “driver’s license” lady. I’m glad the supervisor wasn’t as dysfunctional.
In fairness, here’s a positive airport security story. Or at least an amusing one.
TSA guy at his post, checking IDs and tickets. Sometimes they ask you simple questions because if it’s a fake ID or whatever, you might get caught off guard. So he says, “What’s your name?”
“Peter David.”
“Where are you going?”
“LA.” Then *I* suddenly say, “What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
And without hesitation, the guy says, “Eh? I don’t know that–!”
And then together we both go “AHHHHHHHHH.”
Instantly everything stops. Every eye of every TSA person is on us.
A moment of dead silence.
And I say to the guy, loudly enough for my voice to carry, “You know, in retrospect, doing Monty Python schtick at a security checkpoint probably wasn’t the best idea.”
And the guy says, “Yeah, I really didn’t think that one through.” Quickly he stamps my ticket and the other TSA people kind of roll their eyes.
I have a feeling that if I worked security at an airport, I’d be like that guy.
PAD
Priceless.
A rather infuriating event was my ex-wife and I trying to fly to Santa Monica. We were waiting in LaGuardia at our assigned terminal waiting area when all the info for our flight went down from the board, info for a new flight went up, and all attendants disappeared. Our entire flight stood there confused, wondering why no boarding was announced. A few minutes later, a new attendant arrives and starts typing away at her computer, ignoring us. We let her go for a bit before one of us dares to ask her what happened to our flight. She doesn’t even bother to look up from her screen, and with a vapid smile says in an annoyingly chipper voice “I’m not HEEEEEERE!!!”. She pointedly refused to answer any questions, AT ALL, because after all, she was assigned to a different flight, which meant she did not exist in OUR space/time continuum. It took some calls, but we eventually found out our flight had changed gates without any announcements. Thankfully, we all made it, but there were more than one of us who wanted to throttle a certain someone’s non-existant neck
On our last trip back from Mobile, we fortunately got in early, and they booked us on an earlier flight. (overheard her telling the other guy at the desk that our original flight was already scheduled to delay two hours, and would probably be canceled!)
We to through security, find the gate, and wait. There is no one manning the gate at all. Fifteen minutes before the plane is supposed to leave, there is no plane, and no one manning the desk. Monitors still have the flight as on time. (but the later flight is now displayed as cancelled!)
Finally, five minutes before the flight was to leave, we hear, faintly, an announcement over the PA system – our flight is delayed by weather. It will be LEAVING Houston shortly. Still no one at the gate. To ask questions, you would need to go out to the ticket counter, and then come back in through security. We wait.
After about 45 minutes, still no one at the gate. My wife calls the airline and checks on flight status. The automated system says our flight left Mobile on time… We try to contact a human, and are put on hold for twenty minutes.
Finally, after about an hour, someone finally sneaks in to man the gate…
See, if I’d been there, I would have walked over and calmly started rattling off the Tom Lehrer song “The Elements” because there’s no way she can work while that’s happening.
PAD
Thanks for sharing that, PAD. I myself am a frequent traveler for my job and can appreciate your experience.
One time I was on the customs line in Brazil in about 2005. At the time, Brazil had started to reciprocate the fingerprinting requirement that the US of A had instituted on Brazilians that came to the US, and as a result there were three customs lines: Brazilian Nationals, All visitors to Brazil except US citizens, and US Citizens. Being a US citizen coming in from a flight in Houston, I was on the US line.
Immediately in front of me online were four men who I recalled were on my flight. They were all wearing quite large cowboy hats…. which made them easy to recall and stood out in my mind. A conversation had started between the four of them about how ridiculous the whole customs exercise was and that the Brazilians had “a lot of nerve” to want their fingerprints. This, they surmised, was a violation of their civil rights. They then started to talk about the fact that they weren’t even allowed to bring their guns with them on the trip, and that the Brazilians are lucky that they couldn’t.
The line started to progress forward, and I didn’t move with them, creating about 6 feet of space between me and the rest of the line. A woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder and nicely asked me to move forward. A said her “you really don’t want to be over there right now”, and kept my distance. I continually left about 6 feet of space between me and the rest of the line as the line moved forward.
The four gentleman continued to discuss their civil rights dilemma, adding to the conversation the idea that Brazil wouldn’t even have people travelling here if it wasn’t for the United States. And started to surmise that Brazil should just let US citizens “through with a wave and a thank you”. I then started to leave a little more distance between me and the front portion of the line. The woman behind me who had asked me to move forward was now even separating from me.
When the group in front of me was the next to talk to the customs agent, a uniformed Brazilian customs agent walked over from the wall he was standing next to and asked, in very well spoken English, for the four of them to come with him for questioning. The four men looked at the agent with disgust and proclaimed that they did not need to go anywhere and asked the agent if he realized where they were from. He then spoke very quickly in Portuguese and three agents with what appeared to be semi automatic weaponry appeared around the group of four men. He then asked again for them to accompany him for questioning. And this time they did.
Will there be any more “Adventures in Lima” posts?
TSA and customs stories are legion. My worst experiences [except for having El Salvador military guys with machine guns interview us on the plane when we landed; and having to slap a lit cigarette out the mouth of an Israeli security guy when he insisted on unscrewing the small gas tank from my camping stove] have been in the US:
1. Landing in JFK from Vancouver, a customs guy thought we were from Colombia [because my ticket said I was from British Columbia] and took us in for interrogation and baggage and body searches. We finally got his supervisor to come and he did apologize for out treatment.
2. Flying from Albuquerque we found that a bottle of rum was confiscated from our checked baggage with a TSA note that hazardous material was confiscated. When I phoned them and accused them of stealing my rum, the guy was upset, but couldn’t tell me where the bottle was- when I told him a friend would come by the airport and pick it up.
3. Being taken in and skin searched because I drove up to the US border in Quebec, and asked “Is this a slow day?” after they stripped everything out of my car and left it on the pavement. They refused to put anything back in my car and were yelling at me to hurry up and reload my car. My wife [in the waiting room] then started taking her clothes off and asking if they wanted to strip search her too. They told her that if she took her clothes off they would arrest her. I asked them if I was under arrest, since I was naked, and they said yes if I didn’t put my clothes on immediatly.
4-50. Too numerous to mention. We try to avoid flying thu the US if we can avoid it. But I have lots of family and friends who live there and we put up with this crap from reps fo the land of the free.